DeusExMachina

I think that the problem arises because people equate things that are not the same.

One person learning something is good. At scale, that becomes everyone learning something. That's even better.

Machine learning is not scaling up people learning. It's completely different even if it's called "learning".

As the article argues, it's plagiarism at scale. In that sense, one person plagiarizing content is bad. Everyone plagiarizing at scale by using LLMs is even worse.

I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.

It does not matter what standing Musk has, the question is the important part, not the asker. You can accuse him of hipocrisy and that still makes no difference. He can still be the vehicle for the question to be asked.

The role of the government is to make the laws, and to apply them when violation are reported. It is also to regulate new situations as they arise, for example, if a court decides the law allows a non-profit to become a for-profit and that is deemed as not desirable, new laws can be passed to amend that.

It is the government roles, however, to going around to aks hypothetical questions before they are risen by someone, as there are too many possible hypotheticals, most never materialize, and that would be a conflict of interest. In that case Musk is as good as a vehicle as anyone else because he is bringing to the court a real-life problem that needs to be decided.

The Trump admin is not fond of enforcing regulations as the Biden admin was not fond of enforcing other regulations. That shows you can't expect the govenment to take that role since it's discretionary.

As I read around, this lawsuit raised an important question: can a non-profit become a for-profit company?

To that extent, what Musk was happy or unhappy with is irrelevant. What is actually allowed by the law is more important.

However, it seems that the lawsuit was not phrased that way and Musk just looked for damages to himself. In that frame it's not much of a surprise that things ended this way.

Also, when most work is unproductive, like managers shuffling around and relabeling issues, you can remove those managers without affecting output.

This is an idea I had in mind since I started developing for the Mac 20(!) years ago. I obviously never even got to create a prototype, so it's cool to see someone finally implement it.

> Natural selection will take care of them in due course.

While you are seemingly not at the moment, some day you might be at the receiving end of that "natural selection" in ways that seriously impact your remainint time on the planet.

In that case you might reconsider your stance, and especially question how natural is the selection of a few powerful rich people depriving others of their way to earn a living and their way to draw meaning from their lives.

The AI revolution keeps getting compared to the industrial revolution, but people keep forgetting the consequences of that one.

It is your opinion that it is a bad thing and that it affects all his other points. That's why you felt the need to cite those points. And you did the same in this comment, which is again an ad hominem.

> please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism

Ad hominem. Criticize the argument. Your opinion about Shellenberger or even his other opinions are irrelevant.

I don't particularly like him, but that does not mean all his points are invalid.

> But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking.

> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.

Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.

> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.

Quote:

> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.

> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.

Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

The same should be said of the senile old women that damage Europe's reputation. That is, if they were actually elected and not appointed by bureaucrats.

One thing you learn from game theory is that you need to understand the rules of the game everyone is playing. You cannot change them, you can only play by them.

"Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.

I don't disagree with providing people with more privacy, but what you present is a false dichotomy.

For a long time we lived with private messages over SMS that were easily readable by third parties.

You are forgetting all the money Google pays to be the default search engine in every browser.

The same way you avoid it doing anything else illegal that involves cash.

Crime is risky, but not pure anarchy. It is still based on trust and rules, just not those written in the law.

There are plenty of regular people who interact with criminals, for example drug dealers, without getting murdered or robbed of all the cash they are carrying.

In Argentina, years ago, you could exchange dollars/euros for pesos on the street and get a far better exchange rate than in a bank. It was obviously aimed at tourists, who didn't get robbed, or the whole enterprise would stop.

Then the others should also not be shielded from criticism instead of focusing only on the one you personally dislike, or his social media.

There is plenty of toxic behavior on other platforms, especially Reddit and Bluesky, to name a few. That does not excuse the one coming from X, but the opposite is also true.

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

I'm not sure how this follows logically from the comment you are replying to, which states:

> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities.

I also use it every day. It does its job, but it has many usability issues that make it less than ideal.

For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode.

The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying.

It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the desktop version. Then, I have to toggle the HTML mode and delete the retained tags, which on a phone takes time. The desktop version, instead, has a button to remove all formatting.

That can be said about any post that goes against the guidelines. At that point, why even have guidelines in the first place?

The same happens with their developer frameworks. I used to submit tickets (radars, as they call them) for framework bugs clearly reproducible in a few lines of code. They never got fixed over multiple OS releases, so I stopped bothering.

> One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders [...] is social media and the attention economy.

This problem of democracy was already discussed in ancient Greece. Social media might have exacerbated it, but it's not new. Over the millennia, nobody found a valid solution, or at least one that is devoid of other problems.

Education is not the solution, as we are probably the most educated populations in history and we are all still prone to the same problem. And who decides what is the correct education? Every side has their own definition, so there you have another problem.

It is amazing the lenghts Apple is willing to go to make exceptions only in individual places that force them to.

Where did you pull those numbers out from?

But ok, if we want to play with made up numbers, pop-ups working with the 0.01% of viewers that are willing to spend money are worth alienating even 10% of people that will never spend a dime.

You are assuming every visitor is the same, when most are just a waste of resources.

Revenue is how businesses and even no-profits survive. You can be idealistic about it all you want, but if there is no cash flow, those websites will go away.

> I understand that some companies depend on ads, but this is not my problem

It is their problem, though, and they have figured out that pop-ups work. It is not their problem, however, if you decide to never go to their website again. They likely do not want you to go anymore to their website if you are never going to contribute anything.

> why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man?

Because that is not a given, as shown by the entirety of human history. Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal.

> Do you need god in your life to want to love your children?

Most people don't need God to love their children, and the ones that don't might not be convinced otherwise by God.

That said, what do you do exactly for that love? Do you cheat and steal to guarantee their future over others? If not because of some "benefit to society" logical argument that would convince no-one, why would one even care about that and not exploit society for their own benefit?

Almost everyone loves themselves and their family above all others. Only God can tell you to love your neighbors and even your enemies.

There are still many societies around the world where most people are mostly self centered and you can see the results. You are taking for granted many values you have, as if you arrived to them logically and indipendently instead of learning them from your parents and a society that derived them from God for centuries.

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.

Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.

When people want to claim that socialism works, they point at countries that aren't socialist.

Socialism is very well defined and it's made nebulous only to claim virtues it doesn't have.

Scandinavian countries aren't socialist. They themselves say they are not socialist and a simple google search for "are scandinavian countries socialist?" will show you that the consensus is that they are not.

Socialism "might" always work in an immaginary world that does not take into account the reality of the human condition.

One of the many flaws of such immaginary worlds is thinking that people will be content to live in a system where they have no creative outlet left and nothing they do will have any ultimate meaning.

People in those conditions might burn down the system for the mere excitement of novelty. Even experimental rat utopias quickly degenerate.